No, there will be no greater generation. After all, it was the Greatest, not the Greatest So Far. There is nothing special about Americans, only their belief that there is, and America itself is decreasingly special. Americans, like anyone else, rise to the calls of leadership and necessity. The Greatest Generation was a response elicited by a vacuum in global power. "The American Century" was multi-determined and was not the expression of an inherently gifted hyperethical "generation".
Circumstance is not on the side of our generation. America is, after all, in relative decline. This means we will necessarily not make more money than our parents. If trends are reliable, it seems we are entering an era of a multi-polar political world, which is most likely a good thing. So the confidence generated by American exceptionalism can no longer feedback to inspire Americans to greatness.
The best we ought to hope for is that we can be adequately cooperative with the world and not make horrible mistakes (cf. September 2001 – October 2008). But great leadership can get us halfway to "greatness." I think Obama's calls to a multi-faceted worldview may be this century's version of the calls to American world-stewardship. Thus, the sacrifice we should be prepared to make is to forgo the self-satisfaction of thinking too highly of ourselves. If we have a more modest view of ourselves, we may take government more seriously, allow it to provide services we earnestly need, and we may even care enough to hold our leaders accountable for their misdeeds.
-- Jacob Levine
PROGRESSIVES SHOULD BE SKEPTICAL OF ANY PROPOSAL TO EMBRACE RELIGIOUS FUNDAMENTALISM. These people just destroyed the Republican Party – why should anyone take them on board? That said, there may be reasons such proposals could survive skepticism. Evangelicals are having some success marketing their own fundamentalism in the current environmentally-conscious market, and I do appreciate this unusual alliance in order to save planet Earth. But for issues that don’t involve impending global disaster, I think fundamentalists should be left to brood over the End Times in the quiet comfort of their own organizations.
There is no question that when Christian organizations practice the actual moral teachings of Jesus Christ through various charitable activities and environmental activism, this is helpful to the recipients of said activities. Should the government finance said practices? Why on earth should it?
As I understand it, the presence of religious charitable organizations is an important justification for the horrors of free-market capitalism – a major constituent of a very small private sector of organizations that help those who are sacrificed to the creative destruction of a free-market system. So, why should they need any money from our secular government? The ‘moral sentiments’ of the capitalists ought to keep the churches bankrolled. Keep the government out of economics but subsidize the churches? Ridiculous.
Funding religious humanitarian activity gets us into some pretty awkward decisions about what churches can do with government money. And, as in the famous case of abstinence-based education for people dying of AIDS in Africa, funneling aid money through religious organizations can be fatally problematic.
I say we show our respect and appreciation for the charitable work of religious organizations by saying “Thank You!” After all, doesn’t something so cheap as money offend their lofty morals anyways?
Despite (or rather because of) his disturbingly adept ability to speak in tongues with his fellow Christians, I am put off by Obama’s ideas about religion. Obviously, I appreciate their sheer brilliant cunning. There was no question that his rhetoric was right for the time. But I hope that time will soon pass and religious fundamentalism will fall into another slumber, as it’s done before in America’s young history.
-- Jacob Levine
"We must patiently explain why taxing or regulating noble things (like work, saving, and entrepreneurial risk-taking) means you’ll get less of what makes America great and why subsidizing other things (like idleness and single parenthood) means you’ll get more of the destructive behaviors that ultimately will drag us down."
— An excerpt from a piece in the National Review by the vice president of government relations for the Heritage Foundation.
This quote is what you get when you have an imperialistic economic theory that you apply to every facet of life. If you’re an overzealous economist, then all human behavior can be explained and predicted because human individuals obey one law: maximize economic gain. If this is true, then everywhere you put an incentive, law-abiding homo economicus will follow.
Can we agree this is a bit simplistic? It’s typical of scientists to choose models that are tractable, no matter how much they distort reality.
Show me the single mother who has chosen to raise her child on her own because there’s a tax incentive. Do these econo-zealots even stop to think about how ridiculous this sounds?
Furthermore, there should be no problem resulting from taxing noble things, so long as it’s noble people who do those things. Anyone who’s read Aristotle or Nietzsche should know that the ‘noble’ man would find economic disincentive quite beneath him as a deterrent of behavior.
The problem with this hyper-extension of economic theory is that human values are much more complex and multi-determined than these reward/punishment laws can deal with. That economics is largely built on a mythical foundation is one of our society’s greatest secrets.
-- Jacob Levine
Well, it’s only less than a percent of the amount we've put into "rescuing" the financial sector, so I'm sure that $5 billion is not enough for the task. So I may not be answering the question, but I think there is one major priority for government money right now, no matter how small the amount: A public works project to build a new infrastructure for green transportation.
Ironically, this is the perfect time for an auto industry crisis. We need a major effort to not modify but reorganize the transportation infrastructure in the US. In order to replace petroleum as the energy source for our cars, we need cars that don't use petroleum and gas stations that don't pump gas. The transformation has to be concerted: the infrastructure and the cars each need the other in order to exist.
Only government and not private enterprise—at least in the real world—can orchestrate something that requires this degree of coordination.
Of course, there’s this problem: Once you have the infrastructure, what do you plug it into? That is, we still need a green source for all that energy. I am actually not too concerned about this. I think creating the infrastructure is the primary priority, because once it exists it will create the competitive space for forthcoming solutions. Coming up with clever ways to move energy around is actually not very difficult. Creating a structural-economic framework in which technological development can be instantiated is the real, pressing challenge.
-- Jacob Levine
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